Feedly and Evernote Suffer DDoS Attacks and Extortion Demands

The most popular RSS feed reader, Feedly, remained offline all of Wednesday as it battled a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that kept the services offline for several hours.

In a blog post Wednesday morning, Feedly acknowledged the fact that an attacker tried to extort money from the company to seize the ongoing attack, and let normal operations continue. Founder and CEO of Feedly, Edwin Khodabakchian stated in the post he “refused to give in” to the attackers social engineering tactics.

Feedly noted on Twitter:

The service is under a denial of service attack. We are working with our network provider to deflect it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

— feedly (@feedly) June 11, 2014

Khodabakchian insured users that the service outage is strictly due to a DDoS attack and that no customer information has been comprised. In the blog post the company noted they are working with network providers to mitigate the attack and upgrade the infrastructure, it took Feedly a few hours to fully restore its services back to normal.

Feedly is the worlds largest RSS feed reader, meaning users can put all their favorite websites RSS feeds into the system, and have a live roll of all the content that is published in one place. Users from there can click on the articles and read them from inside the RSS feed reader, or visit the site to read the full article. RSS feeds simplify reading news from user favorite sources, and Feedly is the top provider to date.

Next, the note-taking service, Evernote, also fell victim to a DDoS attack. The company stated in Twitter:

Evernote service is currently unavailable. We are working to resolve the issue. Updates to follow. Thanks for your patience.

— evernote (@evernote) June 10, 2014

The attack that Evernote fell victim to on Tuesday took the service offline for about five hours in total.

Evernote is a note-taking application that allows users to take notes on the go. Users can sync notes from various devices into the cloud for them or others to have access too. Evernote allows for small pictures, voice notes, and written or drawn notes to be synced in users account. Evernote is reported to have over 100 million total users.

The attack between Feedly and Evernote remains unknown if it was the same attacker , but Evernote recently integrated its service with Feedly pro, the premium version of Feedly’s RSS reader.

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is when an attacker sends an enormous amount of packets, requests, or bandwidth to a server at a rapid pace. The goal is to overwhelm the servers and turn the service offline as servers cannot handle the amount of bandwidth or requests begin sent. In turn services will go offline and can cost companies thousands.